November 21, 2005

The Anti-Smoking Idiocy Continues

Majikthise has one of the most recent stupid events in the war on smoking - HarperCollins creating a fictious pose for an illustrator of classic fiction. Will someone stop this insanity? Anyone? I was listening to a commentary track on an episode of Desperate Housewives last week, and the series creator noted that the one thing the network really wanted out of the show was the fact that one of the characters was smoking. They apparently had no problem with the fact that the character who was smoking was a married woman who had just had sex with a high schooler. I'm not saying we should go back to the bad old days of cigarette company lies. And I don't think that smoking is something we should celebrate. I was thumbing through a new history of the US Senate, The Most Excluisve Club, and saw an advertisment featuring Senator Charles Curtis (R-KS) (who later served as Vice President of the United States) endorsing a brand of cigarettes. That's not terribly responsible. But this business of wiping any image of cigarettes or smokers out of recorded history needs to be stopped.

Posted by armand at November 21, 2005 04:03 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Culture


Comments

i'm pretty sure this is available only to TimesSelect people, and insofar as it's illustrated in full there's no way to copy and paste it, but in any case, for those who can see it, check out this cartoon on the guilty pleasure of smoking. it's actually quite lovely, and more than a little a propos with regard to those things we're taking away from our children (any idea that people smoke and it's not the end of the world) and the other things we are not (e.g., video games that glorify war).

Posted by: Moon at November 22, 2005 10:25 AM | PERMALINK
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